PROTESTING IS NOT PROBLEM SOLVING
By Alice Kuo Shippee
“The world is burning,” my good friend John texted me recently, followed by, “and I can’t have a conversation over text about it because it feels cheap. So, here’s a pic of my new Vans.” He lives in NYC, and while he texted that to me weeks ago before the college protests became what they are tonight, John was so very right. The world is a calamitous mess politically & socially everywhere…and what on earth can any of us do about it but try to stay sane, count the small blessings, and share the little joys we have?
My friend’s daughter is at Barnard College now, in her sophomore year. Her roommate was arrested at one of the protests last week, and tonight the entire population of Columbia and Barnard are instructed to shelter in place—like what happens when there’s an active shooter. The NYPD have been called in by Columbia to secure the situation, so police officers in riot gear are entering school buildings.
Jews are heartbroken, bewildered, and frightened by the flare up of anti-Israel protests on campus at several Ivy League and other high status universities like Brown and UCLA. Jewish parents are angry that their students are told not to attend classes at the schools they are paying tuition to in the tens of thousands of dollars. University professors have stood in solidarity with the students and are disenchanted by university leadership. Palestinians see the war on Hamas as a war on all Palestinians. They want “an end to the 1967 Israeli occupation and the right to live freely, safely, and securely in our own independent state with clear borders achieved through a negotiated permanent peace,” as well as the actual implementation of the Oslo I and II agreements (Husseini, 12 Feb 2024).
No one thinks they’re the bad guy. And unfortunately, anyone can be on the wrong side of history depending on the interpretation. Some things that I have assumed are deal-breakers don’t seem to be dealbreakers to people anymore: the killing of women and children, the bombing of hospitals, entire groups of college students calling for violence against another at their own schools, felons running for office. I thought it would have been really easy for us to all come together against the easiest common enemy, but oddly, no.
Universities are put in the unreasonable and impossible position of being experimental utopian societies, microcosms of the real world, where everyone starts by living on campus to (hopefully) integrate into an inclusive, intelligent group of young people who all have the common goal of becoming more educated and employable. But to be real, let’s look carefully at what that really is.
The freshman class of any university is made up of students who are 17-19 years old, only three months out of high school. Most have never lived on their own. They now live in dormitories where the majority are on a meal plan, so most of them aren’t even cooking for themselves yet. You can bet your bottom dollar on that at the Ivy Leagues. While all of these students worked their tails off to get into these highly competitive, prestigious schools, they are all still in the first months of experience living outside their childhood homes, no matter what homes those were, except for some who may have lived independently much earlier than expected.
The senior class at any of these universities has only been in ”the real world,” for less than four years. Maybe they have traveled, maybe they have gone on study abroad, maybe they have faced some serious health or family challenges, maybe they’ve had to grow up quickly. But no matter what, they still have only a limited amount of life experience.
According to brain science, none of these students has a fully developed frontal lobe. Just barely are they reaching that threshold. According to the 2018 article in The Lancet, researchers suggest that instead of 10-19 years, “a definition of 10–24 years corresponds more closely to adolescent growth and popular understandings of this life phase.” This new definition struck a nerve with those readers who agreed that the older age seems to reflect what is going on in recent years—that the journey from childhood to adulthood is protracted or delayed in many ways. If childhood is needing others to take care of you, and adulthood is being able to take care of oneself and others, I think that most college students don’t really fall into the definition of full adulthood just yet. Adolescence is this very long bridge between the two.
So, college protesters are adolescents. And they might absolutely hate my saying so. My warning to everyone upset by them, to the university leadership swayed by them, by the parents worried about them is: Remember that they are adolescents. Be careful of placing too much political weight in their slogans and demands. Be careful of making permanent their actions and thoughts. They are still evolving, as we all have (I hope) since our own college days.
While at UCLA in the early 1990’s, I protested Operation Desert Storm. I didn’t really understand the entire situation when I was in college. I certainly didn’t have any solutions. How could I? I knew almost nothing about Iraq or Kuwait or the oil industry. I had never been to the Middle East, and even if I had, would it qualify me as an expert? Definitely not. I also protested the repeated increases in tuition, which grew from $500 per quarter to more than $3000 my last quarter. I knew those hikes seemed unreasonable, but no one ever really explained it us, so I protested but never understood the accounting.
It’s important that college students have a chance to stand up for what they believe in, to speak their opinions, to be active politically. It’s also really important that they be self-aware about their own limitations in life experience, to be humble in their intellect. Know that there’s a lot you don’t know. It’s like being an expert on parenting before you have children. Or saying what you would do if you were the boss. Or coming up with all the answers with friends at the corner pub. Armchair quarterbacks are in living rooms all over the country, but NFL coaches don’t call them for advice.
It could be that it takes until you’re 24, or until you’ve had a job, or become a parent, or a boss, or god forbid, gone to war yourself, before you really have a more complete picture of the entire connectedness of the world. A college campus is still quite a small universe. When one looks long and hard at the intrinsic and manufactured inter-connectedness of human societies, solutions may appear—or further problems. Your four years in college are a chance to just begin scraping the surface of all of that.
And protesting isn’t the same problem solving. Protesting is potentially dangerous and definitely noisy, and that is really great for calling attention to an issue. Protesting is one of the most obvious examples of free speech, which is an essential value in democracy. But how much and what kinds of protest are in service to solving the problem? Feeling that something is unjust and expressing indignation about it is one phase of initiating change. At what point does protest become yet another problem, stalling and preventing the real work that needs to be done? Universities, as all schools and workplaces, have codes of conduct in place, that students agreed to upon enrollment. If students can’t get along here, where there are no bombs being dropped, where they could go to school safely with Starbucks in hand, then how is bringing the violence here better than being an example of peaceful co-existence? If your enemy is your classmate, the social experiment that is college is a failure; it becomes only a mirror of society and no longer a remedy.
I really hope that the universities will somehow, after the dust is settled, emphasize asking the kinds of questions that will lead to deeper answers and the great work that needs to be done for long term solutions. If you can’t change people’s minds, change their lives. If you feed the hungry, educate the masses, heal the sick, you change the quality of their existence. Only then can they begin to shift their ways of thinking. But these efforts take time—a long time. This is the heart of development work. It takes patience, which I think is at an all-time low among everyone since the pandemic. It takes listening to what people need. It also takes realizing that at the heart of terrorism is the abuse and bondage of those who don’t have their needs met. There is where radicalism and fundamentalism grow. And where those groups rub up against other groups, we will always have conflict. Real politics and social change are about the long game, which you only really begin to understand when you’ve been in the game longer.
I am always wondering, what do people need? What will make their lives better today and tomorrow? And anyone who knows me knows that I am also loud and willing to call things out and make myself a target by doing so. But with my older age now has come the temperance that was lacking in my youth. After the noise is made and the fingers are pointed, who will do the work? Who is ready to do the very lengthy, hard labor of finding solutions and understanding that with every solution there comes a problem, and can stick out the cycle of trial and error, getting feedback, and not giving up? And if you’re one of the students who will do the work, then just start now. The world needs you. We need you in the lab, coming up with the cures.
I have always believed that young people are the future, and that our country benefits from younger leadership, innovation, and energy. Teenagers especially have given me hope—because they hold the potential of the next decade and beyond. I hope that these young protesters will go back to their classrooms and dialogue, listen, map, and plan for true change, the kind that leads to their peers in wartorn countries being able to have lives and dreams as wonderful as going to college.